Her nakedness was not absolute, for like Manet's _Olympia__, behind her ear she had a poisonous flower with orange petals, and she also wore a gold bangle on her right wrist and a necklace of tiny pearls. I imagined I would never see anything more exciting for as long as I lived, and today I can confirm that I was right.

but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.

Curiosity is one of the many masks of love.

We'll grow old waiting.

She asked him to come and see her that night. He agreed, in order to get away, knowing that he was incapable of going. But that night, in his burning bed, he understood that he had to go see her, even if he were not capable. He got dressed by feel, listening in the dark to his brother's calm breathing, the dry cough of his father in the next room, the asthma of the hens in the courtyard, the buzz of the mosquitoes, the beating of his heart, and the inordinate bustle of a world that he had not noticed until then, and he went out in the sleeping street.

and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love but without the problems of love.

The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.